Breaking Down the Curveball Ending of Robert De Niro’s Netflix Political Thriller Zero Day

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Zero Day.

“Those are the facts, but not the truth.”

As former U.S. president turned special commission investigator George Mullen (Robert De Niro) delivers a climactic closing speech in the final scene of Netflix’s new political thriller Zero Day, it’s this admission that gets to the heart of the show’s message about the importance of truth in today’s world.

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Created by producer Eric Newman (American Primeval, Narcos) and former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim, and directed by Emmy winner Lesli Linka Glatter (Homeland, Mad Men), the six-episode series, now streaming, follows Mullen as he attempts to track down the perpetrators of a nationwide cyberattack that briefly crashes the United States power grid—causing thousands of fatalities and provoking widespread panic—before they can strike again. However, Mullen is also dealing with his own demons, including lapses in memory and auditory and visual hallucinations, that make him (and those around him) question his judgment.

The finale of Zero Day manages to deliver a satisfying conclusion to its tale of De Niro’s aging and once-revered leader being summoned back into action by current POTUS Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) to get to the bottom of this unprecedented threat. While the series does leave some questions open-ended—we’re left to decide on our own whether Mullen’s disorientation is the result of early dementia or a top-secret neurological weapon known as Proteus—we at least get answers about who orchestrated the Zero Day attack and what they thought it would accomplish.

Read More: Robert De Niro’s Netflix Political Thriller Zero Day Holds an Uncanny Mirror to Contemporary Chaos

Who was behind the Zero Day attack?

Following the arrest and subsequent apparent suicide of tech billionaire Monica Kidder (Gaby Hoffmann) in the penultimate episode, we learn the full extent of the involvement of Mullen’s daughter Alex (Lizzy Caplan) and several of her fellow members of Congress in the Zero Day plot.

During a meeting of the group at the office of Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine), Alex reveals she was under the impression that Zero Day would be “one minute of system shock” that would put power into the right hands for a few months, restore faith in the government, and get the country back on track. She never wanted anyone to get hurt and begs the group to come clean. However, Dreyer insists they have to finish what they started.

When the power grid once again goes down, a threat to his safety forces Mullen to try to flee his upstate New York compound despite the protestors at the gates. Chaos and violence ensue, but CIA director Jeremy Lasch (Bill Camp) shows up just in time to secret Mullen away while reports are sent out that he’s been killed. Lasch explains he and President Mitchell had strong suspicions Zero Day involved actors from inside the government, which was why they needed someone outside of the normal channels, like Mullen, to investigate.

When Mullen confronts Alex at her apartment, she explains how Kidder came on board and offered to deploy the malware used for the attack through the apps owned by her company Panoply only after the idea had been cooked up by Dreyer and his lackeys. She then begs for her dad’s help.

Mullen summons Dreyer to a secret meeting and threatens to arrest him but Dreyer not-so-politely suggests a different course of action: He and the rest of the guilty members of Congress will step down when their terms are up, Mullen can blame Zero Day on Kidder and shady billionaire investor Robert Lyndon (Clark Gregg), and that can be the end of it. If Mullen doesn’t agree, Alex will go down along with everyone else.

While delivering the Zero Day commission’s final report before a joint session of Congress, Mullen once again begins hearing the song that was playing when he found his late son’s body. This prompts him to stop his prepared speech and instead speak from the heart about why the truth matters. He then reads from a letter Alex left for him in which she confesses to her involvement and states she plans to turn herself in.

Despite the personal, professional, and national consequences at stake, Mullen chooses to publicly divulge the identities of everyone who was behind the deadly Zero Day cyberterrorism attack that’s shaken America to its core. Mullen is clearly hopeful his honesty will lead to the beginning of a new chapter for his deeply fragmented country and help the American people rally together to confront a common enemy. It’s a bittersweet ending, with the final few scenes of the series implying that Mullen has now lost the rest of his family in pursuit of doing what was “right.”

Of course, in real life, it doesn’t seem like there could ever be quite so simple a solution to the dire state of contemporary American polarization. As TIME TV critic Judy Berman put it, “The show’s extreme efforts to avoid offense, the bromides about truth and liberty it offers in lieu of more specific and potentially controversial insights, feel a bit like a betrayal of its plainspoken hero.”

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